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Just gonna start this off with obligatory "I'm the music dude, not an expert". I certainly found this an interesting time! I get a sense of a larger universe I'm just seeing a glimpse of.


Spoilers:





I did finish the game to the best of my knowledge, at least, I beat the lost soul and was sent back to the homescreen.


Gameplay: As ghostinthegame mentioned, it seemed a little inconsistent regarding where I could walk in the first area. Some trees seemed walkable when they shouldn't have been, some seemed to block me when I wouldn't have thought they could.


The section that had me running around in space mashing "z" was a bit frustrating. To be honest, I had to double check the dialogue to know what I was doing. There was clearly a lot of effort put into the dialogue, but the sheer volume of it did make it easy for me to glaze over instructions.

I think the game may have skipped the section inside the house. I was given the equation to figure out by the creatures within, I left and came back and I was suddenly in the next area? I couldn't seem to find a way to get them to repeat the equation or find a place to give my answer.

I liked the mazes, but I did find some of the bonus items in the chests a little redundant given the brevity of the game.


Story: It is very clear that you have quite the complex universe set out, possible a little much to drop in the span of an hour and a half game. I found some of the ideas interesting, but some of the dialogue seemed to be a bit incoherent to me. Maybe if these ideas were given to the player a little more slowly, they'd be a bit easier to digest. It might be my misinterpretation, but I did seem to feel some of the characters would benefit from having their speech combed over or having a set vocabulary.


Presentation: This was certainly an interesting game to look at, although some of the environments didn't seem to mesh together too well. The area between the house and the labyrinthine being of a lower resolution took me out of the atmosphere a little. I think some of your music choices could be a little better. A 4/4 rock song with a shred solo doesn't really say "horrors beyond comprehension" to me.


Creativity: This was a hell of a ride! The universe of this game is certainly something I couldn't have dreamed up in a hundred years.


Horror: I didn't really find myself having any kind of heart-racing terror reactions, but the setting is certainly eerie and the cosmic scale of the environment was pretty unsettling.


Theme: I'm not exactly sure how a lot of this is subterranean, the labyrinthine section within Erroris felt like it was underground somewhere, which I'm now seeing is what you've wrote as your justification. Fair play. You definitely check the box for mazes!


Conclusion: This was certainly a fascinating experience. A lot of this game gave me a similar very feeling to reading an obscure occult webpage. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with next!

With regards to the trees' collision... square tiles are problematic due to this (since trees aren't square themselves there's often a bit that's either overly blocked, or unblocked... but I'll try to see if anything's inconsistent). As with regards to your perception that it merely transferred you to the other place without doing anything, well, the answer to their 'riddle' wasn't so much verbal as based on answering in some form by going around the room... I'm not saying it's an interesting puzzle, by any means... but, it's what I thought of doing, for some reason... but, yes, I mainly intended to create an atmosphere through the 'lore'... not so much puzzles, per se...

You specialize in music? I don't... but why do you think the music selected wasn't appropriate? I thought the initial one was, in particular... added to the gloom... the battle music (although I wasn't necessarily going for horror with a character who, for some reason, ended up with not much of a story... such battles in games I played, e.g. Gilgamesh in FF5, all had such grandiose-sounding music, so I went there...) - it was also, admittedly, a bit long for such a short battle (I don't exactly spend much time tinkering with battle mechanics, either... and I only recently decreased that vampire's stats after playtesting it and noticing he was too tough... might be a bit the reverse now...) The music in the labyrinth.. ended up sounding a bit strange, but then, I thought, the place was fairly odd itself...

By set vocabulary... do you mean they don't seem to have their own personalities? I found it a bit tricky to distinguish them in that sense, and before I changed the middle character's hair he even looked like the other one too... how could the plot go slower, though? What was specifically incoherent?

When it comes to graphics, and resolutions... it's mainly due to ending up using whatever's available (graphics certainly isn't something I can do, either, my focus is mostly writing... which is why I often end up procrastinating on the technical aspects...) - but I also tend to integrate them within the narrative... although, I don't think I did much with the labyrinth and its town... still, since it's a place which isn't as it first appears, I suppose a difference in appearance makes sense, too...

If you think this was at all interesting then you might like to try my other games, too, although most apart from 3 are prototypes... The Cold's Hold has more of this sort of writing, but it's a much looser narrative where I let my thoughts wander...

I see, I guess I answered the riddle without noticing then.

I thought the initial track was a good fit. It was largely the final battle music that threw me. I was just thinking you'd get a better sense of fear and dread across with something a little more dissonant and a little less melodic. But I guess it all depends on the vibe you want from your scene.


Regarding my vocabulary comment, that's about what I was going for. Especially with some of your NPCs if you decided something like "this guy talks very surely and properly, never abbreviates or speaks improperly" and "this one stutters and is prone to awkward phrasing". I noticed a familiar speech patterns across a couple of different NPCs.

It's possible I was having a bit of trouble with some of the concepts, I tend to be pretty literal. There were quite a few paragraphs of text in succession without a lot of gameplay in between. For a game of this length, it's pretty common for the story to be something that can be summed up in a few sentences. 


I was wondering if it was a meta choice to have to art style change, but my suspension of disbelief did take a bit of a hit. 

I'll be sure to take a trip to your page when I'm in the mood for detailed worldbuilding!